This chapter seeks to fill a lacuna in our developing understanding of Global South climate litigation concerning how such litigation emerges. The focus is the different, prototypical modes of legal action in the Global South and how they are shaped by particular actors, including local activists, global nonprofit foundations, and lawyers. We propose a theoretical framework to explain these modes and their implications for the emergence of climate litigation in the Global South. The overarching objective of our enquiry is to provide insights for both scholars and practitioners about the key drivers that make climate litigation more or less likely, as well as the conditions that support or obstruct the emergence of climate litigation in developing countries.

Climate change poses serious adaptation challenges for countries in Southeast Asia, including how climate change impacts will be managed under environmental and planning law frameworks. At the same time. in Southeast Asia, climate change litigation involving questions of adaptation planning is at a nascent stage. There is also little research and scholarship on climate change legal developments in this part of the world. This chapter aims to evaluate prospects for adaptation-focused climate change litigation in Southeast Asia. It considers three key Southeast Asian jurisdictions – the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore – which illustrate differing levels of receptivity to such cases given their existing legal frameworks and litigation cultures. With climate litigation in general at an early stage in these jurisdictions, this chapter attempts to draw lessons for further development of this body of case law from the more developed climate adaptation jurisprudence in neighbouring Australia. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the necessary preconditions for growth of climate adaptation litigation in the Southeast Asian region.

Any plausible solution to the world’s growing climate crisis will need to take root in the Asia Pacific region. With Asia holding 54 per cent of the world’s projected 2050 population and 41 per cent of its projected 2040 energy use, a policy response to climate change that does not include a major role for Asia and does not give voice to the region’s governments and citizens would be wholly incapable of achieving the kind of decarbonization that scientists agree is necessary to avert climate catastrophe.

INTRODUCTION

Cities have existed since prehistoric times. Over the past 2,000 years, a few cities have emerged as international political centres. These were mostly imperial cities – such as Thebes, Babylon, Persepolis, Rome, and Constantinople – which were ‘capitals of great empires and their conquered territories’. In China, the Spring and Autumn period (771–481 BC) was the age of the city state; the area surrounding the Yellow River was divided into hundreds of states, most of which consisted of a single city and its hinterland. In more recent history, cities including Vienna, St Petersburg, Amsterdam, and London also asserted significant social and political influence on the international stage. These cities wielded a significant amount of power and influence because of the strength and wealth of the empires over which they ruled.

Urbanization in the twentieth-first century differs from the past in its rate and scale. In 1800, when the global population was around a billion people, Beijing was the only city in the world with more than a million inhabitants. In 2014, Tokyo was the world's largest city, with 38 million inhabitants. The UN projects that by 2030, the world will have forty-one megacities with a population of at least 10 million inhabitants each. In 1950, one-third of the world's population lived in cities. This figure is expected to rise to two-thirds by 2050. It should also be noted that there is invariably a close connection between rural areas and urban metropolises. Rood and his colleagues, for example, have demonstrated that a land area about four times larger than the Netherlands is used to meet the food and fibre needs of this highly urbanized country. It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that we are living in an ‘urban age’.